PESHAWAR, Pakistan: A bomb blast claimed by the Taleban killed seven people in northwest Pakistan yesterday, despite heightened security across the country during the month of Muharram.
Four boys were among the dead and 30 other people were injured when the remote-controlled bomb exploded on the outskirts of Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police said.
The Pakistani Taleban claimed responsibility.
“We carried out the attack,” spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location. “The government can make whatever security arrangements it wants but it cannot stop our attacks.”
The blast followed another suicide attack — also claimed by the Pakistani Taleban — that killed 23 people in the garrison city of Rawalpindi Thursday.
Authorities subsequently ordered heightened security, with services for mobile phones — which are often used to trigger bombs — suspended in major cities.
But that did not prevent Saturday’s attack. Police said a 10-kilogramme (22-pound) bomb was hidden in a dustbin and its powerful blast could be heard several kilometers away.
“The death toll is now seven, four of them are children,” local hospital chief Aziz Baluch told AFP. “Four of the wounded were in critical condition, they have been shifted to the central city of Multan.”
Akhtar Nawaz, another official at the state-run district headquarters hospital said three children were dead on arrival and the four other people died after being admitted. City police chief Khalid Suhail said the dead children were aged between six and 11 years. “They were young boys,” he said.
Mobile and wireless phone services were temporarily blocked in the commercial capital Karachi, the southwestern city of Quetta and several cities and towns in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces as well as in parts of the capital Islamabad.
It is the second time Pakistan has shut down mobile networks during Muharram.
Seven killed in Pakistan blast
